They discovered the oldest human fossil outside of Africa

It is more than proven that Homo sapiens, the species to which we belong, has evolved in Africa. Witness the oldest fossils found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, corresponding to what appears to be five anatomically modern human beings, 315,000 years old. An investigation now suggests that in southern Greece, the longest specimen was discovered outside the black continent. At the same time, it was shown that there were several migrations, even though not all of them led to permanent occupations.

The discovery is a partial skull discovered in the Greek cave of Apidima in the late 1970s. Paleoanthropologists from the universities of Tübingen, Germany, and Athens, Greece, claimed that it was belonged to a sapiens 210,000 years ago, making it in the first member of our known species out of Africa, the oldest in Eurasia. The skull, called Apidima 1, has suffered some damage but retains some features that identify it as that of a modern human being: the back is rounded and lacks clbadic Neanderthal features, such as the "bun" Occipital "distinctive, a protuberance of the posterior part of the skull that recalls the collected hair.

Next to the fossil, a second skull, Apidima 2, was identified as that of a Neanderthal. Although the conditions are less favorable, certain features, such as the crest of rounded and thick eyebrows (supra-orbital bull), reflect its nature.

The researchers used virtual reconstructions of the damaged parts, made numerous comparisons with different human fossils, and used an extremely precise radiometric dating method to determine their age. The results showed that the Neanderthal skull is about 170 000 years old, which corresponds to other hominids of the same species that are found throughout Europe, while that is not the case. Apidima 1 lived in the same place 40,000 years ago. "The discovery reveals that at least two groups of hominids inhabited what is now southern Greece in the Middle Pleistocene: an early population of Homo sapiens and, later, a group of Neanderthals", explained Katerina Harvati, lead author of the study. .

"The skull of Apidima 1 shows an earlier dispersion that occurred earlier than expected, and which has also spread geographically to Europe itself," he added. .

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